Mona Lisa Style: The Real Value of an Old Master

Visitors take pictures of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, Paris, on April 9, 2018.

NurPhoto

Visit the Louvre on any given day and you’ll witness a very peculiar cultural phenomenon in the European Paintings galleries. It is here, in Room 711, that hordes of visitors congregate, as they have done for decades, to stand before one panel: Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine cloth merchant, otherwise known as the Mona Lisa. Many seem bewildered to find themselves pondering a small, dark, 500-year-old painting from behind a wooden barrier as they are jostled by a crowd of hundreds. They stay for a few seconds, they snap their selfies, and then they move on.

There are masterpieces by Titian and Tintoretto on display nearby. There are even five other paintings by Leonardo just around the corner, some better than the Mona Lisa. But the tourists’ determination to pay homage to this work above all others has little to do with her artistic merit.

So why do they come? Chiefly, because she is colossally famous. In 1911, the portrait was stolen by an Italian nationalist and taken to Florence, its image endlessly reproduced in newspapers until it was recovered two years later. The smiling, enigmatic seductress was then parodied by Marcel Duchamp and by the Surrealists, reworked by Andy Warhol and embraced by the advertising industry; each successive iteration of her image increasing her notoriety and fuelling yet further appropriations—an endless feedback loop that transformed her from a simple painting into a cultural meme decades before the internet. Most recently, she has appeared in the video for Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Apeshit, which was filmed at the Louvre and begins and ends with the couple standing alone in front of the Leonardo portrait (at press time, the video has been viewed over 111 million times on Youtube).

The Mona Lisa’s fame has given her an almost transcendental power. “The painting is a pilgrimage piece,” says Gail Dexter Lord, co-founder of the advisory firm Lord Cultural Resources, who compares the streams of tourists drawn to the Leonardo portrait with the medieval Christians who trekked across Europe to visit cathedrals housing the bones, body parts and clothes of saints. They did so because they believed that seeing or touching the saintly object would bring them closer to God, cleanse their soul, expedite their journey to heaven or cure their illness.

Whether they realize it or not, people who visit the Mona Lisa today are on a modern-day, artistic pilgrimage of sorts. They think that simply seeing the painting “will confer some kind of cultural attainment on them,” says Lord. “They can go back home and say, ‘I saw her.’ There is undoubtedly a spiritual quality to the visit.” For Lord, the journey to see the painting, if not the reality of standing in front of it, may be fulfilling a basic human need for a quasi-sacred experience at a time when universal faith has been overtaken by consumerism.

The pilgrimage comparison fits neatly. Just as relics were housed in elaborate, sometimes bejewelled containers, the Mona Lisa is the only painting in the Louvre’s collection of some 6,000 to be displayed in its own protective reliquary—a specially-constructed climate-controlled box, set in concrete and fronted by bulletproof glass. And just as relics made medieval cathedrals rich, the Mona Lisa is driving revenue at the Louvre, according to the museum’s own astonishing calculations.

In April, figures in a report prepared by the museum for the Ministry of Culture were leaked to the French press. The analysis was intended to deliver a forceful rebuttal to suggestions made repeatedly by culture minister Françoise Nyssen that the Mona Lisa should be sent on a “grand tour” of French regional museums to fight “cultural segregation”. Removing Leonardo’s portrait from the museum’s walls for just three months, the report claimed, would cost the institution a staggering €35m. Of this, €2m would be to insure the painting on its travels; up to €3m to create a new, mobile climate-controlled display case for the work; and €5m for packaging and transport. Most revelatory of all, though, was the disclosure that, without the Mona Lisa on display for three months, the Louvre stood to lose €13m in entrance fees and a further €7.5m in spending in its shops and restaurant—approximately €228,000 a day—because nine out of 10 visitors apparently come to the museum to see Leonardo’s portrait, the Louvre informed the government. It is not clear where the final €4.5m loss would be incurred; the French press which reported the leaked figures did not shed light on this.

Assuming these figures are not overblown (the museum declined to discuss them), the Mona Lisa is generating a remarkable income for the Louvre for minimal investment. The painting was lightly cleaned in 1952 but has otherwise not been restored in over two centuries. It is not insured so costs the museum nothing in premiums (for the most part, large, government-funded museums in Europe do not insure their collections, “principally for cost reasons” says Adam Prideaux, director of art insurance broker Hallett Independent, but also because national collections are owned by the State and the State generally “does not take out insurance against itself”, explains Prideaux.) The Mona Lisa has not been sent on loan since it toured Japan in 1974 so the Louvre has not incurred any costs associated with such travel. Instead, she is left largely undisturbed in her protective box with the exception of a ritual inspection once a year in the presence of the museum director, staff and scholars, and she is now considered too delicate to be moved—her fragility is the real reason the Louvre does not want to lend her.

She also creates jobs. Lots of them. Every 10,000 visitors to the Louvre creates 8.2 jobs in the local economy, of which 1.15 are jobs in the museum and 7.05 are in related economic activities such as the hotel and restaurant industries, according to a 2004 survey of museums in France by Xavier Greffe cited in Cities, Museums and Soft Power by Gail Dexter Lord and Ngaire Blankenberg. Last year, the Louvre received 8.1 million visitors, the most in the world. If 90 per cent of these came to see the Mona Lisa, as the Louvre claims, then, using Greffe’s formula, the painting alone is responsible for creating 5,978 jobs in the local economy. Of course, this may be a somewhat outlandish conclusion, chiefly because one assumes that the nine out of 10 visitors who told the Louvre they had come to see the Mona Lisa did not come solely to see her. If she were displayed in a separate building with no other works of art, would 7.3m visitors in 2017 (nine-tenths of the total) have visited her and skipped the rest of the Louvre’s treasures? There is no way of knowing.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the Mona Lisa has a significant impact on the Louvre’s finances. Which begs the question: do other Old Master paintings in museum collections generate significant income for their respective institutions and local economies? This is a nearly impossible question to answer: the Louvre is the only major museum surveyed for this article which has asked its punters to name the works of art they have come to visit. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, for example, has conducted no research on the number of its visitors which have come specifically to see its most famous painting: Rembrandt’s magisterial group portrait of a militia company on the move, The Night Watch. It acknowledges that most visitors want “to see the highlights of the collection which include The Night Watch” and that the sale of The Night Watch merchandise, including postcards, socks, mugs and magnets, makes up around 15 per cent of the museum shop revenue. This must be one of the reasons it is Rijksmuseum policy to “never” send the painting out on loan.

What is clear is that there is no correlation between the sum a museum is prepared to spend on an Old Master and the amount that work generates in income or the number of visitors it attracts. The National Gallery in London and the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh together purchased Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, two of the best Old Masters in Britain, for around £100m from the Duke of Sutherland about a decade ago. Like the Rijksmuseum, they also have no research on which paintings visitors have come to see (the Titians rotate between the two institutions). What they do know is that postcards of the £100m Titians do not feature in the list of Top 10 sellers at either institution, which gives some indication of their popular appeal. In London, the most sold postcard is Van Gogh’s Sunflowers while in Edinburgh, postcards of the Titians are outsold by Callum, a reproduction of an 1895 painting of a dog by the English artist John Emms.

Despite the paucity of research in this area, some believe that the pulling power of single paintings (call it the Mona Lisa effect) can be banked on to ensure a surge in visitors to the museums that house them with related economic benefits. Take this recent analysis by Thierry Ehrmann, chief executive of the art database Artprice. Writing in his survey of the art market in 2017 he states that: “For the museum industry, works by Da Vinci, Modigliani or Van Gogh guarantee global cultural influence and an exponential visitor growth rate.” New museums in the Middle East and China, in particular, are hungry for such pieces, he says. “The demand for museum-quality works [in this part of the world] has been one of the driving factors in the spectacular growth of the art market.”

This argument assumes that you can create “pilgrimage pieces” like the Mona Lisa. And that is a highly questionable assumption. “There are so many forces that must converge to give works of art this magical appeal; not only do we not fully understand these forces, we have little power to influence them,” says Gail Dexter Lord. Not even Christie’s multi-million-dollar marketing campaign to convince the world that Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi is a masterpiece or the incessant, global coverage of the $450m sale of the painting in November 2017 has necessarily transformed the painting into a “must-see” work. We do not yet know how many visitors will travel to view it in its new home, the Louvre Abu Dhabi (at the time of going to press, the museum had indefinitely postponed its previously announced plans to display the work in September).

The allure of the Salvator Mundi “has nothing to do with art and everything to do with money,” says George Goldner, who retired as chairman of the drawings and prints department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2015, and before that served as curator of paintings and drawings at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. “If you were to spend $450m on a rare car or diamond and put it on display, a lot of people would come to see it. If the Salvator Mundi had sold for $20m, nobody would go. Any painting that sells for $450m will attract crowds for a while. Then, all of a sudden, people won’t care anymore,” says Goldner.

Even the pulling power of Leonardo da Vinci’s name has its limits. Consider the five paintings of his in the Louvre which are not the Mona Lisa, including The Virgin of the Rocks and The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, which visitors can enjoy in relative peace. And consider his Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, the daughter of a wealthy Florentine banker, which is on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and is the only painting by the artist in the United States. “A week after the sale of the Salvator Mundi, I happened to be at the National Gallery and I wandered into the room with Ginevra de’ Benci, which is a much better painting in much better condition than the Salvator Mundi,” says Goldner. “There was not a single other person there.”

The Mona Lisa, then, is an anomaly, a portrait whose strange power is nearly unique and impossible to replicate. And, despite what Ehrmann believes, most museums do not think about the number of visitors Old Master paintings will attract before they buy them or how much income these acquisitions will generate. Nor should they. “I’ve never worked in a museum where potential income as a result of an acquisition was discussed,” says Goldner. “There are good reasons for that… No single acquisition is likely to change visitor numbers to a museum. Of course, if you could buy the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David, then you would have an immediate and consistent rise in attendance. But there are only around 20 works of art like that in the world. And, in any case, it’s the wrong objective: museums should not behave like corporations; they are non-profit institutions with a clear mission.”

At its core, that mission is to safeguard and augment their collections, conduct research and spread knowledge. Take the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In 2004, then director Philippe de Montebello spent $50m on a painting by Duccio. The gold-ground wooden panel, which dates from around 1290-1300, is tiny. In fact, the painting cost nearly $1.45m more per square centimetre than the Salvator Mundi, making it (and not the $450m Leonardo), the most expensive painting ever sold, at least by square centimetre. At the time of the acquisition, De Montebello described it as “the single most important purchase during my 28 years as director”.

Today, the painting barely merits a second glance from most visitors. “The Duccio is pretty much ignored,” says Paul Jeromack, art dealer, contributor to The Art Newspaper, and frequent visitor to the Met. “Trecento pictures are incredibly sophisticated and are appreciated by very few people. And to their credit, the Met is one of the very few institutions to buy them.” For Keith Christiansen, John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of European Paintings at the museum, “the Met’s mission is to acquire “works crucial to the telling of history across all times and cultures, rather than with a view to popularity or monetary value. In the case of Duccio, one of the acknowledged founders of European painting, the Madonna and Child acquired by the Museum was the last known work by the artist in private hands.”

So the very reason for which museums exist is at odds with the desire to acquire “pilgrimage pieces” that will attract huge numbers of visitors and their cash. Even the Mona Lisa, money-spinner that she is, could be said to divert attention from the Louvre’s primary purpose. The former French culture minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon warned earlier this year that the Louvre is “a victim of the Mona Lisa” and that it was “absurd” for culture ministers to “encourage this sort of cultural consumption” by seeking to send the Leonardo portrait on tour. It is a warning that is unlikely to divert the millions of tourists who will continue to come to see her, year after year, as long as she wields her mysterious power.